The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Elvis Presley · Scotty Moore, Bill Black, D.J. Fontana · produced by Sam Phillips and Steve Sholes · RCA Victor · twelve tracks, about 29 minutes
Mode
Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, country ballad and a Tin Pan Alley standard, read by one singer
Mythos
The possessed young singer, wild and tender at once, built by voice, sequence and the cover photograph; the singer’s later legend charged to the career
Phase
Twelve tracks, six to a side; an opening run that alternates fast and slow, a close on two Sun ballads, a second side that runs fast and slow to a fast end
Presentation
Album; the US RCA Victor LP of 1956, LPM-1254, mono, about twenty-nine minutes; seven RCA tracks and five Sun masters, every song another writer’s
Register
A voice that moves from shout to hush and falsetto over electric guitar, slap bass and, on the RCA tracks, drums and piano; the Sun echo beside duller rooms
Scale
A young man and the girl he wants; the dance and its clothes; the South and its two musics heard in one voice
Governing Proposition
A major label’s first long-playing record by the new singer it had bought, assembled from his first sessions for it and from tapes left at the small Memphis studio where he began, shows that one young Southern voice can hold the black song and the white, the shout and the croon, as a single manner of singing, and makes of that voice and its photograph a figure of youth both wild and tender. Its greatest things are performances; its form is a selection, and the selection argues.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on another man’s song. “Blue Suede Shoes” was Carl Perkins’s hit in the first months of 1956, and the first thing the new singer does on his first long-playing record is take it over: two minutes of guitar, slap bass and drums and a voice that treats the song as if it had always been his. The title names the dance and its clothes, the property of the young, and the track states the record’s method before any other track is heard. It is the album’s first and clearest act of form, a decision with meaning placed where it must be heard first.
The album is the US RCA Victor LP issued in March 1956, catalogue LPM-1254, in mono: twelve tracks, six to a side, about twenty-nine minutes, no track as long as three minutes. Seven come from RCA’s first sessions with Elvis Presley, held in Nashville on 10 and 11 January and in New York on 30 and 31 January 1956 and produced by Steve Sholes. Five come from the Sun masters of 1954 and 1955, recorded in Memphis and produced by Sam Phillips, unissued or unused there, which RCA bought with the singer’s contract in November 1955. Scotty Moore plays electric guitar and Bill Black upright bass throughout; D.J. Fontana plays drums on the RCA tracks.
Every song is another writer’s, and several had been hits for others: “Tutti Frutti” for Little Richard in 1955, “Money Honey” for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters in 1953, “I Got a Woman” for Ray Charles in 1954; “Blue Moon” had been a standard since 1934. The record is a selection, not a composition, and “Heartbreak Hotel”, recorded at the same January sessions in Nashville, is not on it. That absence is a fact about the unit. The album is judged as it was issued, and the singles of the period, the later issues with those singles added and the British issue with its different order are not part of it.
Movement II
The record’s thesis is a single word. “I Got a Woman”, third on side one, opens with the singer alone: a sung “Well”, held before the band comes in, and then a song of Ray Charles’s driven at a pace that leaves no room for anything but want. The voice hiccups, swings from loud to soft and back, and places each phrase against the beat with a timing that is the track’s real subject. The body’s urgency is made the matter of a popular record, and the record says so in its first breath.
What the album brings into the open can be put in a sentence. One young white Southern voice holds the rhythm and blues of Ray Charles, Little Richard and the Drifters, the country ballads of Leon Payne and Jimmy Wakely, and a Rodgers and Hart standard, not as visits to each but as one manner of singing. That is a disclosure about the American South and its divided musics, and about youth as a condition with a voice of its own. It is heard in every track, and it is the record’s strongest claim to knowledge.
It is carried more than it is articulated. The songs are borrowed and their meanings are the ordinary ones of courtship, longing and the dance; the crossing of the colour line, which is the record’s largest meaning, is in the sound and not in the shaping of the work. The disclosure that a whole new America followed belongs to the career and the culture, to television and the singles and to the reaction to them. Charged to the unit, it is a voice on twelve tracks, most of them love songs, and the voice is enough to hold the figure where it stands and not enough to raise it.
Movement III
Fifth on side two, “Blue Moon” is the highest and strangest thing on the record. Recorded at Sun in 1954, it takes a Rodgers and Hart standard and empties it: guitar and bass in a clip-clop figure, a voice in an echo, the lyric nearly gone, and in its place a wordless falsetto that drifts above the beat. Every element is required, and nothing is added. It is a nocturne nearer to dread than to romance, a standard sung as if from the far side of a room at night, and the loneliness in it is the one point at which the record reaches past courtship into consciousness.
“Trying to Get to You”, second on side two and also from Sun, is the record’s other height: a performance that climbs through the song toward a pitch of need the song on paper does not hold, as if each verse compelled the next. “I Got a Woman” and “Money Honey” reach elevation of the other kind, transport by drive. Between these summits the ground is level. The middle of side one is pleasant and flat, “Just Because” is a romp, and “Tutti Frutti” has the excitement of Little Richard’s record without its abandon.
The Sun tracks are where the making is most in command. Moore’s lines are economical and exact, Black’s slap bass carries the rhythm, and Phillips’s slapback room is used as an instrument rather than a place. The voice is the most commanded instrument on the record, its falsetto and breath control in “Blue Moon” placed with precision by a singer of twenty or twenty-one. The Sun tapes have had seventy years of close listening and keep yielding, though much of that attention belongs to the Sun recordings as a body, and to the singer, rather than to this album.
Movement IV
Between the fourth and fifth tracks of side one the record changes rooms. “One-Sided Love Affair” is an RCA track with drums and piano, competent and routine; “I Love You Because”, Leon Payne’s ballad, is a Sun master of 1954 with guitar, bass and an echo. The same voice sings both, and the change between them is a change of physics, not a development. The join is heard and not used. The record lets a listener hear one singer in two studios by accident, and that document of a voice changing rooms is part of why it rewards return, but the form does no more with the change than let it be heard.
The subtractive test bites here, at the margins. “I’m Counting on You” and “One-Sided Love Affair” could go and little the record says would be lost; “Just Because” and “I’ll Never Let You Go” each double the other in the record’s argument. Side one closes on two Sun ballads and side two on “Money Honey” in a way that fills a side rather than shapes one, and the twelve tracks could stand in many orders: the extended-play records issued from the same tapes show how readily they stand alone. The necessity is inside the tracks and in the alternation between fast and slow, not in the order of each side.
What holds the record together is the voice. Take the two most distant elements, “Tutti Frutti” at full tilt with drums and piano and “Blue Moon” in its Memphis echo, and one rule governs both: the singer takes each song away from its first meaning toward his own blend of urgency and hush. The range is wide for a record of its year, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, country ballad and Tin Pan Alley, and narrowness is not the fault. Integration is. There is one law at the level of the singer and two at the level of the record, and the first is the stronger: the alternation it governs is the form in which the record knows what it knows, though the closes of the sides are not shaped by it.
Movement V
“Money Honey”, recorded in Nashville, closes the record on the Drifters’ song of 1953, played for drive, with the voice’s timing doing most of the work and money entering the record lightly at the last. It is a strong track and an ordinary close. What the record holds lies close together: desire and the couple throughout, youth as a social order in the sound, the dance and its clothes, and the South and its two musics heard unstated in the voice. Labour, the family beyond the couple, the state, the sacred and the natural order are absent, though the gospel is in the voice.
The figure the record builds is on its cover as much as in its grooves. The sleeve is a black and white photograph of the singer in performance, mouth open and guitar raised, with his name in pink down the left and green along the bottom: a raw live image where a posed portrait was usual. The sequence sets the shouter beside the crooner, and the youth who results, wild and tender at once, is load-bearing in the album as issued. The sleeve became a model for what a rock album should look like, and The Clash’s London Calling (1979), at 8.8 here, answers it directly. The later legend of the singer belongs to the career and is not counted.
The record’s consequence stands above its making as a whole. It put the reorganisation made at Sun in 1954 on a major label’s long-playing record, turned that album toward young listeners, and survives whole after seventy years, the singer and the sleeve present everywhere and the album as issued still in print at the head of its expanded editions. Kind of Blue, of nearly the same age, stands at 8.8, and A Hard Day’s Night, made whole of its makers’ own songs, stands a tier below this record at 7.7. Nothing here rests on the fame alone. What places the album in Tier IV is what the unit carries: one voice holding two musics, set in an alternation that argues it, and a format changed by it. What holds it in the lower part of the tier is the unit as well: an assembled LP of covers and leftovers, whose greatest things are performances and whose history-making belongs in part to records that are not on it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites, because the record was assembled rather than made: seven tracks from RCA’s first sessions in Nashville and New York in January 1956, five from Sun masters bought with the contract, and “Heartbreak Hotel”, recorded at the same Nashville sessions, held back. Remove “I’m Counting on You” or “One-Sided Love Affair” and little the record says is lost; “Just Because” and “I’ll Never Let You Go” each double the other. But the test bites at the margins and not at the centre. What the record has to say lives in the alternation of shout and croon, and that alternation requires both kinds of track: take out the ballads and it is a rock and roll record, take out the shouters and it is a crooner’s. Inside the tracks the necessity is plain, in “Blue Moon”, where every element is required, “Trying to Get to You”, which climbs as if compelled, and “Blue Suede Shoes”, which opens the record with a reason. The figure rests at 7.6, a tenth above the cap and no more: the whole is compelled in its argument and permitted in its particulars.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and what the record brings into the open can be stated: that one young white Southern voice could hold the rhythm and blues of Ray Charles, Little Richard and the Drifters, the country ballads of Leon Payne and Jimmy Wakely and a Rodgers and Hart standard, not as visits to each but as one manner of singing; and that the body’s urgency, announced by the unaccompanied “Well” that opens “I Got a Woman”, could be the subject of a popular record. That is the disclosure of a meaning and not of a mood, and it holds. Held below the gate because the work carries this more than it articulates it: the songs are borrowed, their meanings those of courtship and the dance, and the crossing of the colour line is heard rather than shaped.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Height is reached, and often. “Blue Moon” is the highest and strangest thing on the record: a standard emptied into an echoing, wordless falsetto over a loping figure, a nocturne nearer to dread than to romance. “Trying to Get to You” rises through the performance to a pitch of need the song on paper does not hold. “I Got a Woman” and “Money Honey” reach the other kind of elevation, transport by drive, and “Blue Suede Shoes” opens the record already raised. That is frequency as well as height. What holds the figure short of the top: the middle of side one is pleasant and flat, “Just Because” is a romp, and “Tutti Frutti” has the excitement of its model without the abandon. Several summits across twelve short tracks, and the record returns to height more than it leaves it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The danger here is crediting the myth of the singer to the record, and his later legend is charged to the career, not to the work. Credited to the work: it builds one figure, the possessed young singer in whom desire and an older sorrow live together, and the cover, part of the album as released, fixes that figure in one image of open mouth and raised guitar. The sequence sets the shouter of “I Got a Woman” beside the crooner of “I Love You Because”, and the archetype that results, the youth both wild and tender, is load-bearing: made by the record’s alternation, not summoned by allusion. Nothing in the words is archetypal, and the figure is made by persona, sequence and image rather than by story: built, and built well enough to stand at the gate, by none of the means that would carry it past.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the long-playing record as a major label used it in 1956, for adult popular singers, cast albums, jazz and the classics; and the rhythm and blues and country records the songs came from. The turn on the first is large, and so was the stake: RCA put the new music on its long-playing format, with a raw live photograph for a cover, when the music was widely expected to pass. The turn on the second is smaller than it sounds. The fusion of country and rhythm and blues in one voice was made at Sun in 1954, and five of these tracks are that earlier work; the RCA tracks cover hits, several of them current. But the swerve that counts is the unit’s own, the step from the single to the album, taken before anyone knew the music would last. Borrowed in the style, large in the format, and the format carries the figure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. What the record knows, that one voice holds the rocker and the ballad, the black song and the white, lives in alternation, and the form enacts it: the opening run sets “Blue Suede Shoes”, a ballad, “I Got a Woman”, a ballad, and side two runs fast and slow to the fast end of “Money Honey”. Put the shouters on one side and the ballads on the other and the record stops saying that one voice holds both; it becomes two records. Placing “Blue Suede Shoes” first is a decision with meaning, another man’s hit of the moment taken over in the first two minutes. What holds the figure below 8.0: side one closes on two Sun ballads as if filling a side rather than shaping it; the change of room between the Sun and RCA tracks is heard and not used; and most tracks stand alone, as the extended-play records cut from the same tapes show.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence is preferred to promise, and the evidence is long. The Sun recordings have had seventy years of close listening and keep yielding: the phrasing of “Blue Moon” and “Trying to Get to You”, Scotty Moore’s lines, the slapback room, the question of what exactly the singer took from black singers and from crooners. Much of that attention is paid to the Sun tapes as a body and to the singer, but five of those tapes are this album, and it holds them beside the RCA work, where each kind of track is heard against the other. The RCA tracks yield more than they first seem to: “Money Honey” and “I Got a Woman” repay attention to the voice’s attack and timing, and only “One-Sided Love Affair” and “I’m Counting on You” give little a second time. The record also rewards return as a document of one voice in two rooms. Real depth in most of the performances, shallow in two.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is popular music of the mid 1950s, the long-playing record above all. The intrinsic force is large as a fact and real as a made thing: the album reorganises no musical possibility the Sun singles had not already reorganised, but it put that reorganisation on the long-playing record and made the rock and roll album a viable form, with a sleeve that became a model for what such an album should look like. Much of the reach is the singer’s, owed as much to “Heartbreak Hotel”, the Sun singles and television as to this record, and it is discounted to the unit; discounted, it remains very large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the major label’s album turned toward young listeners; the sleeve imitated directly by The Clash’s London Calling (1979) and a model for the rock album cover; and the voice heard on it, which a generation of British and American musicians named as their first impulse. Few records changed their field so much on their own account.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is weighed over seventy years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the mono LP has been kept in print and reissued, its original sequence restored at the head of the expanded editions. Presence is wide for the singer, for several tracks, “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Blue Moon” and “Money Honey”, and for the cover, one of the most reproduced images in the history of the record. Presence of the album heard whole is narrower: it is met more often in compilations, and the singles kept off it are more heard than most of what is on it, but the narrowing is of attention, not of the work, which remains whole and in print. The fabric is mono and dated, the Sun echo and the RCA rooms audible as years, but they are the medium of the form, and the recordings remain clear. Nothing of it has been lost.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The voice is the most commanded instrument on the record and is load-bearing: the timing in “Money Honey”, the hiccup and dynamic swing of “I Got a Woman”, the falsetto and breath of “Blue Moon”, the climb of “Trying to Get to You”, each placed with precision by a singer of twenty or twenty-one. Scotty Moore’s guitar is economical and exact, Bill Black’s slap bass carries the Sun tracks, and Sam Phillips’s slapback room is used as an instrument; on the RCA tracks drums join the trio without loss of drive. The faults are real and weigh lightly against so much command: the New York tracks are recorded in a duller room, “Tutti Frutti” is played faster and stiffer than it is felt, two arrangements are routine, and piano and drums on several RCA tracks are generic.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: “Tutti Frutti”, recorded for RCA in January 1956 with drums and piano at full tilt, and “Blue Moon”, recorded at Sun in Memphis in 1954 with guitar, bass and a voice in an echo. They obey one law, and the law is the voice, which reads a Little Richard shout and a Rodgers and Hart standard by one rule, taking each song from its first meaning toward a blend of urgency and hush, across a range wide for a record of its year. Narrowness is not the issue, and the integration holds: one rule governs so wide a range in every track. What holds the figure near 8.0 is the join. The record is two studios joined by a selection, and between “One-Sided Love Affair” and “I Love You Because” the physics of the room changes, though the law of the voice does not.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Desire and the couple are held throughout: the courtship of “I Got a Woman”, the jilting of “One-Sided Love Affair”, the pursuit of “Trying to Get to You”. Youth as a social order is held in the sound more than the words, the dance and its clothes in “Blue Suede Shoes”; money enters lightly in “Money Honey”. The South and its two musics are held unstated in the voice, the record’s widest order, and it is wide: region and the colour line meet in one manner of singing. Consciousness is reached once, in the loneliness of “Blue Moon”. What holds the figure: labour, the family beyond the couple, the state, the sacred despite the gospel in the voice, and the natural order are absent, and what is present is reached through courtship and the dance.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.2 each, then The Made at 8.8. The album that put the music made at Sun on the major label’s long-playing record and made the rock and roll album a form, with a sleeve imitated a generation later; a record whole and in print for seventy years, with three of its tracks and its cover still everywhere present; and a voice that is load-bearing in every track, in the timing of Money Honey, the swing of I Got a Woman and the falsetto of Blue Moon.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: desire and the couple held throughout, youth and the dance in the sound and the South in the voice, with labour, the family beyond the couple, the state, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Inevitable at 7.6, an assembled record whose alternation is compelled but from which two tracks could go with little lost, the single its sessions were built around held back; and The Living Form at 7.9, an alternation that carries the argument in sides that close as containers.
The Necessity Cap is met: The Inevitable at 7.6 clears the threshold of 7.5 by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.8 and The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Swerve at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5, the last exactly at the bar, clear 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls two tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.3, in the lower half of the band of Tier IV, three tenths above the 8.0 at which the tier begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Epochal Gate would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · Elvis Presley, the US LP as released by RCA Victor in March 1956, catalogue LPM-1254, mono, twelve tracks in their original order, six to a side, about twenty-nine minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception; no recording was in hand, and the running time is approximate. Side one: Blue Suede Shoes; I’m Counting on You; I Got a Woman; One-Sided Love Affair; I Love You Because; Just Because. Side two: Tutti Frutti; Trying to Get to You; I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You); I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’); Blue Moon; Money Honey. Seven tracks are from RCA’s sessions in Nashville (10 and 11 January 1956) and New York (30 and 31 January 1956), produced by Steve Sholes; five are Sun masters of 1954 and 1955, recorded in Memphis and produced by Sam Phillips, sold to RCA with the contract in November 1955. The extended-play records issued from the album, the British issue of 1956, the later reissues with the singles of 1956 added, and the singles not on the LP, among them Heartbreak Hotel, are not judged; the singles and the singer’s career bear on reach and presence only, discounted to the unit. Songs are cited by title, and nothing is quoted but the single word that opens I Got a Woman. Facts that could not be verified, among them the day of release and the extended-play catalogue numbers, the session at which each RCA track was made, several songwriting credits, the further players and backing singers on the RCA sessions, the photographer and occasion of the cover photograph, the price of the contract, and the album’s chart record and sales, are not given.